A Morality Play : Foolishness Is Driving Out Seriousness

This used to be a serious country. The United States was inhabited by engaged citizens and governed by authentic leaders who talked about weighty issues. But the current American political spectacle amounts to a decidedly unfunny bad joke.

First, we had a presidential sex scandal, a yearlong opera bouffe that paralyzed the entire political establishment, preoccupied the media and culminated in a full-dress impeachment proceeding that called into question our national reputation for common sense. Now, the obsession with a presidential candidate’s alleged substance abuse a quarter-century ago threatens to distract us from matters of real substance in the here and now. We are poised once again to plunge into the goofy and politically irrelevant realm of salacious titillations and youthful peccadilloes. A version of Gresham’s law (bad money drives out good money) is corrupting American democracy: Foolishness is relentlessly driving out seriousness. Small wonder that disillusionment with politics runs so deep.

Not so long ago, we used to have a different kind of politics. We used to ask not what a candidate had done to his body but what he could do for the country. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dissembling about his paraplegia, even his dalliance with Lucy Mercer, weighed nothing when put in the scales with his struggles against the Great Depression and Adolf Hitler. Whether Dwight D. Eisenhower had an affair with his wartime driver, Kay Summersby, counted for infinitely less than his ability to lead the Allies to victory in Europe as supreme Allied commander and to end the war in Korea as president. John F. Kennedy may or may not have smoked dope in the White House and bedded Marilyn Monroe, but what really mattered was whether he was levelheaded enough to handle the Cuban missile crisis and how deep his commitment was to the cause of civil rights.

To be sure, fascination with the supposedly lurid private lives of public figures has always been part of our political culture, from allegations about Thomas Jefferson’s assignations with Sally Hemmings to charges that John Quincy Adams was a pimp and Andrew Jackson a bigamist, to whispering campaigns about the drunkenness of Andrew Johnson, the philandering of Grover Cleveland, Warren G. Harding, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and innuendoes about Richard M. Nixon’s psychoses and Ronald Reagan’s amnesia.

But alongside all that scandal-mongering there also thrived a robust engagement with the great public issues of the day: slavery, states’ rights, Reconstruction, the New Deal, World War II, the war against poverty, civil rights, the Cold War, the proper role of government. Now it seems that topics like these have dropped out of our civic discourse, leaving only our prurient interests to fill the space once occupied by a common concern with the public interest. The future of education and work, the fate of the environment, relations with Russia, China and Latin America, campaign-finance reform, trade policy, universal medical care--all go undebated while the Sabbath gasbags and other pundits niggle over a 30-year-old line of coke.

How did this happen?

The conventional wisdom blames the media, which in the post-Watergate era have developed a professional ethos that ranks the expose as the highest form of the journalist’s art. Some commentators cite the corrosive effects of popular culture, which has bred an apparently insatiable appetite for the sensational. Others point to the aggressively antigovernment rhetoric of the Reagan-Bush era, which spawned pervasive disenchantment with public affairs, and still others to the giddy prosperity of the last decade, which has nurtured a ferociously acquisitive individualism and unhinged an entire generation from any sense of common purpose. All these developments have played a role. But the real culprits are elsewhere.

Much of the blame for the sorry state of our civic culture can be laid at the door of the “political consultants” who have risen to prominence in the last few decades. They brandish poll results and parse focus-group survey data, and politicians are then cowed into silence on potentially divisive issues to avoid alienating any possible constituency. Political debate has been reduced to pablum, and aspiring leaders have been robbed of authenticity, once the most valuable of political assets. Genuine argument has been banished from the public square, impoverishing us all, and deepening the already widespread conviction that politics is the realm of the venal and irrelevant.

Gov. George W. Bush’s nascent presidential campaign provides a case in point. Presumably advised by sophisticated handlers, he has to date refused to say anything concrete and meaningful about a single public issue. Small wonder, then, that all attention focuses on his private life: What else has he offered to a public that needs and deserves to know more about him? What right has he to complain about media attacks on his character when vague claims about character are virtually the only qualifications for the presidency that he has thus far seen fit to cite?

In an earlier era, when political consultancy was still a mercifully amateurish affair, public figures defined themselves differently, even at the risk of giving offense. Truly effective leaders were not afraid to divide the house on questions they deemed important. Roosevelt, whose very political identity consisted in his stand on the issues, not in idle speculation about the possible flaws of his character, declared in 1936 that his opponents were “unanimous in their hatred of me, and I welcome their hatred.” He stood squarely on the New Deal program of Social Security, financial-market regulation and labor reform, and eventually on the necessity for intervention in World War II--all highly controversial positions that irritated and even outraged some voters and won election to the presidency no fewer than four times.

After that, Harry S. Truman pugnaciously lambasted the “do-nothing” Republican 80th Congress, split his own party with his embrace of civil rights and scored an upset victory over the heavily favored Thomas E. Dewey. At the risk of dismantling the “solid” Democratic stronghold in the South, Lyndon B. Johnson took up the cause of African Americans and won the presidency in 1964 by the greatest margin of any candidate in U.S. history. Reagan threw down the gauntlet to an entrenched liberal establishment that had dominated American life for nearly half a century and wrought a conservative revolution in American politics.

History counts all these men, Roosevelt especially, among the century’s greatest political leaders. Not incidentally, none of them drew any conspicuous attention to his private life while running for office or while in the White House, a demonstration that Gresham’s law works in reverse, too. Good, honest, authentic politics leaves little room for the trivial gossip that so dominates our era.

Bush should take this point. He should start talking about something real, give voters a sense of his authentic, unpackaged self, and questions about his pharmacological history will be certain to go away. He might even win the election.

It may be objected that such an analysis proceeds from the vulnerable assumption that the past was somehow finer and higher-toned than the frivolous present: the classic reverie of old geezers. But while it may be a law of history that one generation’s political philosophy becomes another generation’s political joke, can that law hold when one generation’s politics is a joke in the first place? Get serious.*